Thursday, September 23, 2010

Performance Tuning and Future Proofing

I wrote up some performance tuning notes for OBJs on the wiki. A few notes on how these rules will change with version 10:

Everything on that note applies to version 10 too. If you've tuned your model for version 9, that effort will be worth it in version 10.

A few rules are even more important in version 10 than before. In particular, I've done a lot of performance tuning for OBJ drawing, but you don't get those wins if you use ATTRibutes. Clean your objects out for maximum speed.

One special case: objects with very small vertex count are sometimes extra fast in version 10. For example, in version 9, a tree with 8 vertices and no attributes is horribly slow. In version 10, this tree will be quite fast. So in version 9 you might make the tree have 64 vertices and look nicer; in version 10 by keeping the tree lean and mean, you get a speed improvement.